Windows Weekly 347 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It’s time for Windows Weekly!
Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here. We’ll take
a look at Microsoft’s quarterly results; there is some pretty good news for Big
Green there. And, Windows 8.1 Update one: Coming soon
to a computer near you. It’s all next, on Windows Weekly.

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Leo: Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cache Fly, at
c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com.

Leo: This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Episode 347, recorded January 29, 2014,

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Leo: It’s time for Windows Weekly – the show where we cover all the
latest news from Microsoft. And here he is ladies and gentlemen, drinking and
talking at the same time, the ventriloquilstylings of Mr. Paul Thurrott,
from –

Leo: By the way, a tip of the hat to Rob Greenlee who was, for I
think eight years, the Podcast Guy at Microsoft. A proto-podcaster—

Paul: The patron saint of Podcasting at Microsoft…

Leo: Yeah…

Paul: Now we’re screwed, though, because… who’s the Podcast Guy now
at Microsoft?

Leo: You know, when Rob left they didn’t really say there was
somebody taking his place at Microsoft.

Paul: Yeah, they did not.

Leo: So, that’s all! [laughs] Good-bye!
And he has taken a new job uh… Where? I can’t remember where though. But, uh,
I’m sure I’ll find it. Anyway, very happy for Rob, and
his uh…

Paul: It is a podcasting company.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: But I can’t think of –

Leo: Oh! It’s called, the name is simple: PodcastOne.
It is, uh --

Paul: Ok. Actually, I thought – that’s funny.

Leo: No, in fact, I interviewed the founder of PodcastOne,
who’s a long-time radio guy who wants to bring the same kind of model for radio
broadcast sales to podcasting, which would just be fabulous. [laughs]

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Norm Pattiz. He’s the guy, you know
the guy because you see him court-side at the Lakers games. Every
game.

Paul: So he’s not hurting for money.

Leo: He has so much money…

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: … and now he’s decided that he’s going to take all the money
from us.

Paul: I’m sometimes seen TV-side at a Celtics game.

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: [laughs]

Leo: With his feet up, and a bowl of nachos in his lap!

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Anyway, congratulations Rob on the new job, and we will miss
you, because he’s been a great advocate for podcasting at Microsoft.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: And he’s uh, I really feel he’s the reason that Windows Phone
has a Podcast category and all of that, so…

Leo: However, that did not seem to impact the bottom line at
Microsoft… [laughs]

Paul: No…

Mary Jo: [laughing] Didn’t help.

Leo: Who wants to take the lead on this one?

Mary Jo: Let Paul do the… the basic numbers.

Leo: Oh, the heavy lifting?

Paul: Geez…

Mary Jo: Yeah, the heavy lifting.

Leo: I could do it! You want me to do it?

Paul: So Microsoft announced last Thursday that their net income
for the most recent quarter, which I believe is their second fiscal quarter but
we might think of it as the fourth calendar quarter of 2013, was $6.56 billion.
Revenues were $24.52 billion, which was a record for that quarter. And so, you
know, the kind of general point there is that this business that is apparently,
you know, circling a drain somewhere is in fact going gangbusters, um, against
–

Leo: I’ve got to point out one thing, though:

Paul:Mmm-hmm?

Leo: (and I don’t mean this in a negative way)

Paul: [laughing] Okay

Leo: But Apple’s profits were doubled Microsoft’s for that quarter.

Paul: Yeah. Actually, in that quarter –

Leo: And that is, for people like you and me, who have been
watching this since the 90s…

Paul: Oh yeah yeahyeah.
Yeah.

Leo: That is like such a turn-around.

Paul: Um, Apple’s… if you just look at iPhone…

Leo: It’s all iPhone, of course...

Paul: That business is bigger than all of Microsoft.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: I’m certainly not –

Leo: It’s amazing.

Paul: It’s particularly true in the quarters where, you know, Apple
has an iPhone launch, like they did in that quarter.

Leo: Yeah, this, well… This was also the holiday buying quarter,
and I think that –

Paul: Yeah, but –

Leo: – this is bigger in a consumer electronics company like Apple
than it is in a company like Microsoft.

Paul: Yeah, and actually, maybe this would be a good way to
transition to what Mary Jo had written about this, but (and we’ll probably
never stop doing this, comparing Apple and Microsoft) the truth is: I don’t
think these companies are all that comparable, and it’s funny because in many
ways they were never all that comparable. Um, when Apple wasn’t doing so well
and they sold this minority PC platform, I mean it was kind of hard to, you
know, compare them to Microsoft.

Leo: But it was in the kind of – well, of course you’re right, it
was a hardware company, not an operating systems company,

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: But it was the competing operating system.

Paul: Yeah, and we still compare them.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: They made that one alternative.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: One major alternative, anyway, and you know today Apple of
course has seen great success with the consumer devices products – iPod first,
then iPhone and iPad – but that’s something Microsoft has never done
particularly well at. And that business has been huge for Apple, but the one
thing that Microsoft has been very consistent about is its performance on the
business side, and I think that’s the kind of analysis piece that Mary Jo had
written about.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: It’s what you said:
Microsoft is still – this is in her All About Microsoft blog – an Enterprise company, and that’s ok.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I mean, I saw so many headlines right after earnings
came out, of people saying “This proves they’re on their way to becoming a
devices and services company, just look at the numbers.” Well, if you actually
do look at the numbers, where Microsoft actually made their money last quarter
was in Enterprise software. So, yes, they’re in the midst of transitioning to
becoming a devices and services company, but if you use their new
classification in terms of how they break out their numbers, the far-and-away
biggest part of their quarter came from the part that’s called “Commercial
Licensing.” And what’s in that is Windows Enterprise, Server Products, Office Business
Products, Dynamics (which is ERP and CRM), and Unified Communications. All software, all business products. No Xbox. No Bing. No
consumer –

Paul: Actually, let me ask you a question on that note. You used
the word “commercial,” which is the word that Microsoft uses to describe their
business products. Is that new language? Because –

Mary Jo: It is.

Paul: I spoke to two different people from Microsoft over the past
twenty-four hours, and both of them used the word “commercial” to describe this
part of the business. And either I’m demented, and losing it quickly, or I just
haven’t been paying attention, or they have never used this language. This is
new language, isn’t it?

Mary Jo: It’s definitely –

Paul: “Commercial.”

Mary Jo: I don’t know exactly when they started calling Enterprise
“Commercial,” but it’s definitely been within the past few quarters, I would
say. So they talk about “Consumer” and “Commercial,” and they don’t talk about
“Enterprise” and “Consumer.”

Paul: Alright.

Mary Jo: It’s a little bit confusing, because sometimes when you
hear the word “commercial” you’re thinking “retail,” right? But that’s not actually
what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about business.

Paul: Yeah, I find it to be an odd term.

Mary Jo: It is. When I hear it, I have to think through it. I’m
like “Wait, which segment are we talking about now?”

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: The second-biggest segment – ok, so Enterprise Software
totally blew everything else away – second-biggest segment was this part of the
company called “Devices and Consumer Licensing.” So, what’s in there? All the Windows sales, Windows Phone OS sales, Office Consumer (for
some reason), and IP licensing. That was the second-biggest group of
products, in terms of their contribution to net profits and revenues.

Leo: IP Licensing. That’s interesting…

Mary Jo: Yeah. So they call that “Licensing.”

Leo: That would be the five bucks a handset they get from Android,
for instance.

Mary Jo: Right. Right. A lot of people
were trying to do the math, based on what they announced during Earnings, to
figure out how much of the part they call “Windows Phone” is actually
patent-licensing revenue versus OS revenue, and it’s a little tricky to break
that out. They make it hard to break that out. The way they’ve got their
Earnings reporting segments organized now, it’s – I’ve seen some Wall Street
analysts say it’s much clearer and more transparent – I actually think it’s
much cloudier, and less transparent. And Paul just left. Where did he go? [laughs]

Paul: You know what happened? My cat was going to have a little
kitty heart attack if I didn’t let her in my office.

Leo:Awwwww…

Paul: She was freaking out.

Leo: I thought you were getting your harmonica. [plays the harmonica]

Paul: She is like a harmonica. You can probably hear her.

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: [laughs]

Paul: So loud.

Leo: Sorry, Mary Jo. Continue, please. [laughs]

Mary Jo: So, the part I’m trying to bring out here - because
everybody was so desperately trying to say “look how great they did with
Devices, look how great they did with the Cloud…” (actually,
they did have an amazing quarter, which really surprised a lot of people on
Wall Street, I think) – they had an amazing quarter
mostly because of their Enterprise business. And that’s not bad! I mean, they
don’t want to be IBM, but they do pretty darn well selling to businesses.

Leo: Yeah. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody who’s paying
attention at all…

Mary Jo: Yeah, sure.

Leo: It does make one wonder, though, if the Windows 8.1 strategy
is quite the thing for that segment.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: Right?

Paul: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, on 8.1. I’ve often described 8.1
as being an improvement over 8.0 (which of course it is), and the way you
describe that improvement is to say it’s interesting because the people that
use desktop computers – traditional computers that don’t have multi-touch
interface – is that they’ve made it better, to use it just in the desktop. They
don’t completely eliminate the Metro stuff, but they mostly eliminate it. I
thought that was a good step. For people that do want to use Windows on a
tablet, they also made it better for those people, because you don’t have to go
to the Control Panel and the desktop as often as you did in the 8.0 release.
You know, it’s funny… That’s one measure of success, but the place where
Windows 8.1 is no more successful than Windows 8 is in the integration of those
environments. It still leaves Windows as this thing that is two separate
environments sitting on the same computer. If anything, Windows 8.1 made that
divide even more pronounced, because Metro is not particularly well-suited for
the desktop, and the desktop is not particularly well-suited for multi-touch.

Leo: Right…

Paul: It’s kind of an interesting, so I think in Update 1 - in
Windows 9, however they do it – they’re going to have to address that issue as
well. My cat is freaking out…

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: Uh-oh… [laughs]

Paul: Needs to be petted, badly.

Leo: Do the results tell us anything about the direction Microsoft
is taking, should be taking, should not be taking?
Does this mean Xbox isn’t important, for instance? It seems –

Mary Jo: No, those –

Leo: It seems to me, even if your revenue is Enterprise-bound, you have to always be looking at other categories...

Mary Jo: They do.

Leo: You can’t just rest on your laurels, right?

Mary Jo: Correct, correct. And, you know, they did have a really
great quarter for Xbox, as well. In fact, when they put out their press release
on Earnings, Xbox was one of the big things they touted, however well they did
with that. And they should have, since that was the holiday quarter, and when they
launched Xbox One…

Paul: What does that mean? I mean, how did Xbox One contribute in a
positive way to the bottom line at Microsoft in that quarter?

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Right?

Leo: How could it? I mean, it’s…

Mary Jo: Well, they –

Paul: But she’s right. They basically said “Thanks to the strength
of the sales of Xbox One and Surface, Microsoft had a blockbuster quarter.”

Leo: They don’t tell you how much…

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: That’s not exactly true, is it? [laughs]

Mary Jo: Well, it contributed to their revenues, and they’re very
positive.

Leo: They can’t lie, but they could – can they misrepresent… Not
“misrepresent,” that’s too strong a word…

Paul: They can choose to highlight what they want.

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Highlight what you choose, there you go. They can spin it.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah. Right.

Paul: They certainly didn’t tell you how many Surfaces they sold.

Mary Jo: No… They told us what Surface revenues were, though,
right? They actually said they were close to $900 million, is that right Paul?

Paul: It is… should be right there…

Mary Jo: I’m kind of blanking out.

Paul: $893 million.

Mary Jo: 893, right, $893 million worth of Surfaces (although they
didn’t break out how many units that was). Again, they can still talk very
positively about the contribution to their revenues that these products are
making, like Xbox and Surface.

Paul: Yeah, can they, though? I mean, what were the revenues for
the iPad at Apple in the same quarter?

Mary Jo: Yeah, I know, right…

Paul: Tens of billions?

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul [laughing] I mean, I don’t know – some crazy amount?

Mary Jo: They’re starting small, and working their way up…

Paul: Boy, I did some crazy math – I don’t know if you saw that –

Mary Jo: I know. I did see your math.

Paul: – attempting to figure out the ASP, which is just a wonderful
episode for someone who is math-challenged.

Mary Jo: “Average Selling Price,” right?

Paul: Because “Surface” means the devices, but it also means the
hardware – you know, the accessories. They mention
that most of the sales were RT devices, not meaning Surface RT but Surface RT
and Surface 2. So we can make some assumptions there about what percentage they
sold of each type of device, what the average selling price of those was,
whether they’ve got a keyboard or other accessory… So how many Surfaces did
they sell? [pause] Not that many. [laughs]

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: I came up with about 1.5 million units.

Leo: 1.5 million. Ah… What does that mean?

Paul: Well, it means that Apple sold 26 million iPads, and you can
do the math there I guess…

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: That’s what it means.

Leo: Microsoft’s never said what the metric for a success would be,
in this case.

Paul: Right,

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: At least not taking a $900 million write-off…

Paul: That’s true, that’s true.

Leo: They’re selling them. Do you think that that number is high,
low, good, bad…? Disappointing, satisfying…?

Paul: I think it’s disappointing, personally, but one of the issues
that they had with Surface over that quarter was that they weren’t available.

Leo: Right.

Paul: I was getting emails the entire month of December, and into
this month.

Leo: Right, right…

Paul: When did Surface 2 finally come back? Last week?

Leo: They make money on them, right? I mean, it’s not one of them
“We’re selling it at cost” items, is it?

Paul: Uh, yeah, Leo, sure they do. [laughs]

Leo: [laughs] Office and Windows are the traditional profit centers
for Microsoft, right?

Mary Jo: Well, even more recently, Server and Tools business was
the biggest profit center, which is Windows Server and
System Center and Visual Studio and all those products…

Leo: Still the case?

Mary Jo: Yes, that is still the case, yes.

Leo: Now, I was talking the other day, I’ve been talking about this
a lot lately, thinking about the idea of platforms, and thinking about the
history of Microsoft… I had this discussion with Dvorak, who as usual kind of
disagreed. The boom of the computer industry in the 80s and 90s was, I think,
almost entirely attributable to the fact that Microsoft provided a stable
platform that developers could write to. It was a known platform; you knew what
you were writing for, you knew that they had a huge installed user base.
Microsoft preserved legacy compatibility all along for those twenty years – I
mean, they really did a good job in that respect… I guess 90s and 2000s would
be the right decades for that. But they world has changed. Microsoft is
recognizing that, and it is in face the Cloud that is the new platform, is it
not?

Paul: It’s one of them. I think mobile devices are –

Leo: Yeah, I guess mobile…

Paul: Although I guess in many ways mobile apps are just front-ends
to online services.

Leo: Yeah, the Cloud, and it started with Amazon web services. In
fact, I’m reading this –

Paul: It really is the Netscape thing. I always come back to this,
and I really didn’t respect Marc Andreessen too much when Netscape was the
thing, and he was talking about how they were going to reduce Windows to a
buggy set of device drivers on which their what we would now call a “cloud OS”
would run.

Leo: Right.

Paul: Yeah, I think there’s something to that. I think the shock
for Microsoft over the past ten years has been that it’s that traditional plan
that you were just talking about, where they would respect backwards
compatibility and customers would just move along with them, came to a crashing
halt.

Leo: Exactly.

Paul: It started with the Apple stuff, right? Because here were
these new platforms that weren’t compatible with anything,
and things like that never took off before.

Leo: Right.

Paul: And you can argue “but why,” or we could discuss that, but I
think that was the big affront to Microsoft.

Leo: So it became very clear – I mean, there’s the Enterprise
Cloud, but there’s this larger cloud as a platform for everybody, which
Google’s promoting with Chromebooks. I think you
nailed it, Paul, when you said that mobile devices are just a front-end to
cloud computing. Amazon began this era with Amazon Web Services, the elastic
computing cloud, S3 storage… Microsoft and Google are both trying to – actually
have parity now, Microsoft first…

Paul: It’s just funny how this technology… It’s weird. It kind of
subverts the historic strength of Microsoft, because it makes the PC and the
server less relevant. When you can cheaply virtualize a server, up in some
cloud service rather than in your own expensive data center, that’s actually a
big benefit to customers.

Leo: But it’s commoditized, right?

Paul: Right. It makes that thing that was Microsoft’s bread and
butter less viable.

Leo: And a lot of companies – HP, RackSpace,
Google – are talking about open stack now, they’re running on open-source
software…

Paul: Yeah. The thing is, when you run stuff locally, that’s when
the historical backwards compatibility is important.

Leo: Right.

Paul: When you run it up in a service, switching between platforms
is no longer a big deal, because you’re not doing the heavy lifting any more.

Leo: It’s true. And in the same way that in the 90s and the 2000s
Microsoft powered an entire economy forward, the cloud has done that
dramatically. Anybody – a startup – starts in these shared systems that are
cheap –

Paul: Leo, Microsoft’s slogan at one time, remember, was “A
computer on every desk in every home,” that kind of thing.

Leo: “… running Windows software.”

Paul: “Running Windows software.” That must have seemed so
forward-leaning in the 1980s, or whenever they came up with that. That sounds
ludicrously old-fashioned today.

Leo: [laughing] It does, doesn’t it!

Paul:A computer?! On a desk?! In my house?! Why would I want that?!

Leo: [laughing] Isn’t that amazing?

Paul: That’s amazing. It is profound, how big of a change.

Leo: So no wonder Microsoft’s struggling a little bit with this.

Paul: [laughing] Well as it turns out –

Leo: They’re still making money, but it’s –

Paul: This quarter does show that –

Leo: They’re still making money.

Paul: They’re still making a lot of money.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: And the way that they’re doing it is by successfully
transitioning the businesses that they can from software to services.

Leo: And that’s what I was leading up to with this ridiculously
circuitous route: What is the report card on that?

Paul: I think they’re doing great in that transition. But I think,
just to step back a second: Mary Jo and I write about Microsoft but really, we
write about Windows, in the sense that Windows is the center of everything, you
know? It’s… not, anymore. And that’s the weirdest transition of all…

Leo: Right.

Paul: … because Microsoft can be very successful without the
Windows desktop being very successful.

Leo: Right.

Paul: It’s so weird,
because Windows was at the center of it all for so long. It was the catalyst
for everything else that happened there.

Leo:Huge change.

Paul: So, I think we tend to focus on that stuff – and maybe
over-focus on it – because it’s been such a constant for twenty years…
twenty-plus years… But it’s changing. And it’s weird, and it’s hard. It’s a
hard transition.

Leo: Yup. Do they break out the Cloud stuff, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: They give you some very vague ideas. They’ll say “We
doubled licenses sold compared to last quarter,” but we don’t know what the
number sold was last quarter, so we don’t really know, which makes it tricky.
The one number that they did break out, which was interesting, was Office 365
Home Premium sales. They’re actually at 3.5 million subscribers for that now,
and that is one of their cloud services.

Leo: That sounds pretty good!

Mary Jo: It is; that’s actually very good.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: What that one is is Microsoft
selling to customers, on a subscription basis, the right to install Office 2013
on up to five PCs or Macs.

Leo: That’s the one I have, and it’s what – ten buck a month? I
can’t even remember now.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it’s roughly that. It’s $99 a year.

Leo: So that’s a significant – we’re talking some money here.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Yep.

Mary Jo: But they did admit that the one reason that that did so
well was they started cannibalizing their own non-subscription Office business.

Leo: But of course.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Of course. Right. It’s not a big
surprise.

Paul: I don’t know if you caught this – I don’t know where this
popped up – but I guess they also said that the Business version (Business versions, I guess) were now at a $1.5
billion revenue run rate.

Leo: Wow.

Paul: And that this is the fastest-growing – yes – commercial
product in their history now.

Mary Jo: That’s Office 365, the business ones, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Nope, I didn’t see that number.

Paul: Yeah, they said that 1 in four of all their business
customers have Office 365, and 60% of the Fortune 500
has purchased 365 in the past year.

Leo: So that’s good. That means that this transition to the
subscription model is working well. If you say 25% have adopted this for the
first year I think that’s good, right?

Paul: I think so.

Leo: That’s very good. That means this new model for software,
which is really software as a service, is succeeding. That’s got to be good
news for Microsoft. So, is this kind of a stalking horse for Windows becoming a
subscription product? I think it is. Microsoft’s always wanted to do that.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: And they do already, in Enterprise, I guess.

Mary Jo: If you talk about – I mean, the word “cloud” means so many
things – if you talk about it as a subscription, and say “Hey, what if we let
you buy five Windows licenses that you can install on any of your family’s PCs,
if you pay us $99 a year,” or whatever, that’s Windows as a subscription just
like Office, right?

Paul: Sure,

Mary Jo: They could do that. Why not?

Paul: I wish they would.

Mary Jo: Or you do something –

Leo: Really? Why, Paul? Why do you want that?

Paul: Well, I think this is the time where Windows is kind of
hitting a shortfall, and you’ve got 400 million XP users that aren’t upgrading
anytime soon. I don’t think this would help businesses, per se, but just making
Windows more easily and cheaply licensable, and providing that same benefit to
families that they do with Office, I think is just a no-brainer.

Leo: Remember, though, that in the Windows – well, I don’t
remember, I shouldn’t be telling you, you should be telling me –

Paul: Do tell, do tell…

Leo: [laughing] In the Windows world, there’s business and there’s
consumers, but in both cases I think the sense that you get is that you buy the
computer with Windows, and you don’t upgrade Windows until you buy the next
computer.

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: So what am I paying for with a subscription, and why should I
pay anything?

Paul: Sure.

Leo: I’ve already bought the computer.

Paul: You’re competing with devices that get upgrades for free
forever – or, for some period of time.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: Yeah, right. It’s that kind of –

Leo: So how do you move from that kind of model?

Mary Jo: How do you move from it, or to it?

Leo: To the subscription model from the model which I think exists
right now, at least in my mind, that I don’t buy Windows. I buy a computer with
Windows on it, and I don’t buy the next copy of Windows until I buy another
computer. In fact, I don’t ever buy it. That’s certainly the consumer mindset.
Is it also the business mindset?

Mary Jo: Yeah, it definitely is.

Leo: Except for the giant enterprises where they’re buying volume
licenses and all that.

Paul: Well, there’s another issue, though, in businesses, where
they don’t want to disrupt operations. We ran into this with the Surface stuff
that we’ll talk about later, where constant updates was a great idea. Constant upgrades that actually work and don’t impact the
reliability of the system is a much better idea.

Leo: [laughing] Much better, yeah.

Paul: And that’s the thing: Enterprise customers, business
customers, these are the guys that would never upgrade until SP1 in the old
days, and then got burned by Service Packs and didn’t want to upgrade ever.
That’s why we have XP. It’s a tough thing, to get from here to there.

Mary Jo: Yeah. If you’re a business customer, and Microsoft says to
you “Ok, how about if you buy Windows on a subscription?” it’s almost like
Software Assurance then, right?

Leo: Yeah right…

Mary Jo: It’s like you tell us that we’ll give you every update and
point release that we do in some set period (like three years for Software Assurance),
and that guarantees you get everything.

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: So that’s another way you come at it.

Paul: A lot of these have that, don’t they? One of the issues that comes up with this XP expiration thing, which is like the
great story of our age, is: who are these 400 million customers? Who are these
people–

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: – who haven’t upgraded?

Leo: Yeah!

Paul: I’ve heard from readers, in my Comments section and via
email, “Why does Microsoft care about these people? They’re not good customers;
they’re still running XP.” The thing is, I actually think that most of those
customers are, in fact, business customers and are good Microsoft customers, and that they do have access to newer versions of Windows (not all of them, but
some significant percentage, through Software Assurance or volume licensing),
and that they have not upgraded because they can’t (or they perceive that they
can’t), because they have these legacy applications or web apps or intranet
sites, or whatever it is that for whatever reason doesn’t work in a modern web
browser or a modern version of Windows, or whatever. They’re kind of stuck on
XP for the same reason that people have always been stuck on old versions of
software. It’s just…

Leo: They don’t want to buy a new piece of hardware.

Paul: I don’t know. I’m just speculating, but I wouldn’t be
surprised if a lot of those guys were, in fact, what we might call good Microsoft customers, in the sense
that are paying–

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: – for SA and volume licensing or whatever, but that they just
can’t make that move.

Paul: Listen, you’ve got to come out of your cabin in the woods and
realize the 80s are over. It’s time to–

Mary Jo: I don’t think it’s, I mean… I think it’s a mix of those
kind of people who just are too cheap, like we’ve talked about before, and then
there are people who really can’t move because of peripherals, software
applications they’ve built, people who’ve built apps which are dependent on
Internet Explorer 6. Like all those people… it’s like you want to encourage
them to move, obviously, so that they aren’t going to be infected by any kind
of a massive security issue once Microsoft stops updating XP, but I also kind
of feel for them. It’s like they’re stuck, right?

Paul: They’re literally stuck. I think that’s the important part,
you know.

Mary Jo: They’re literally stuck.

Paul: And they’re not always running ancient hardware. I remember
back in the Windows 7 days, when that was first coming out, one of the big
concerns then was XP and one of the things with Windows 7 was [to] make sure it
ran on older hardware, and there were all these stories about companies buying
Windows 7-class PCs, wiping it out, and putting Windows XP on it because they
needed it for backwards compatibility. Hopefully. I
mean hopefully they weren’t just doing it because they didn’t want to train
people how to–

Paul: Well, I mean, it’s not just stubbornness, right? I think most
Office/Windows/whatever you can make a case, “Look, I’m not upgrading to the
next version, because this thing I have works fine, and version-to-version
there isn’t enough of an advance,” whatever. Then two versions go by, and it’s
like “Yeah, I’m still not doing it, I’ve got this.” And then three, four
versions go by and it’s like guys, seriously. I mean, you’re running software
that is out-of-date. It’s really out-of-date. It’s insecure… So there’s got to be a reason, and it’s got to be this application compatibility stuff.

Leo: “The Fixer,” in the chat room – and again, this is consumers –
but he says “I have a customer, I’m trying to get her to update. She’s a home
PC user. She said ‘No, I paid $2500 for this PC eleven years ago, and that’s
that!’”

Paul: Wow.

Leo:Ain’t buying another one. I hear
from people on the radio show all the time… Admittedly, a lot of it is
line-of-business software that won’t work on anything but XP, etc., although
that’s why Microsoft put XP in Windows 7, right? So you could run it in
emulation, and run your line-of-business software.

Paul: We’ve got to do like a “car years” thing, right? This will be
living driving around in a car from the 1950s that didn’t have head rests,
didn’t have airbags, didn’t have seatbelts…

Leo: But it looks good!

Paul: Didn’t have any… the styling is there, you know, I get it,
but–

Mary Jo: It still drives…

Paul: Yeah, it still drives.

Leo: It still drives. There was nothing wrong with this car…

Paul: So what if I need leaded gas? Look–

Leo: It still drives.

Paul: It still drives, yeah.

Leo: But with computers it’s worse, because really, truthfully,
computer hardware does not wear out. The only thing that wears out is the hard
drive, people replace those.

Paul: Stupid reliable computers.

Leo: Damn, damn them! [laughs]

Paul: [laughs]

Mary Jo: [laughs]

Paul: That is a strange problem, yeah.

Leo: I mean, iPads that are only three years old have been obsoleted,
by Apple… I don’t hear the hue and cry around that that we ought to hear…

Paul: Right. They’re a company… In the old days, you could make the
case that the user base was fairly small, so they put up with this kind of
aggressive obsoleting of old–

Leo: That’s not true anymore.

Paul: Today, you can’t say that any more. They’ve just established
this thing where people love to spend money on that stuff, you know.

Leo: So back to my question: Does Microsoft not worry about the
consumer market, and just go full speed ahead on Enterprise, or are they
unwilling to give that cash cow up?

Mary Jo: No. It’s more… I actually got to ask Steve Ballmer that
question last year. I said “Why don’t you just focus on the Enterprise? That’s
where you’re killing?”

Leo: Right.

Mary Jo: And he said they believe in the consumerization of IT; that people are bringing their own devices to work–

Leo:Ahh! BYOD killed them.

Mary Jo: Right. They believe in that, and so because they believe
in that, they believe they can’t just leave the consumer market, because that
will be their death knell, if they do that.

Paul: I know there’s an even worse version of BYOD…

Leo: What’s that?

Paul: It’s called BYOE, and that is “Bring Your Own Everything.” In
other words, in the old days you would bring in an iPod or something, which was
kind of radical, and they started super-gluing USB ports so you couldn’t attach
it to your computer.

Leo: Right…

Paul: Today, a lot of people have their own smart phone, their own
tablet, their own computer, and you can do various mobile device management
things to connect those to your corporate infrastructure and so forth… The
“Everything” bit refers to literally everything else, like Dropbox… consumer
services in many ways, that are now being meshed with
this stuff that is like corporate data. It gets scary.

Leo: I understand, because the consumer looks at Dropbox and says “I can use this; I can understand it. This ShareFile or whatever, that’s complicated…” I’m sorry,
SharePoint.

Paul: Well my VPN is terrible to get into, and I can only do it
from my PC.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: But if I take those corporate files, and I put them in my
Dropbox, then I can get to them from my phone, or from my tablet, or from
whatever.

Leo: Right! Right!

Paul: You can sort of see the pragmatism of that–

Leo: Yeah

Paul: But you also have to think about the dark side of that.

Leo: Well, the poor IT department, for one thing.

Mary Jo: Yeah. [laughs]

Leo: They’ve completely lost control.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: I think Ballmer’s answer makes sense, you know: BYOD is
something that killed them, it brought the iPhone into
the business place.

Paul: Leo, NSN is going like gangbusters. Actually, I found their
quarterly earnings to be interesting on a number of levels. Obviously, what we
were looking for was how well did Lumia do, and that kind of
stuff…

Leo: Because Microsoft… when does the transition occur?

Paul: Sometime this year.

Mary Jo: It’s supposed to be this quarter.

Leo: Soon, yeah. All the regulatory approval has gone through, so
we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop now.

Mary Jo: Waiting for China still, I think.

Leo: Oh China, that’s right…

Paul: But if you looked at their actual earnings report, they all
of a sudden in this quarter pretended that these businesses don’t exist any more. It was really funny; they changed it over as if
they had gotten rid of their hardware and services businesses. I can’t remember
the exact language they used, but they basically referred to them as their
“legacy” businesses. The thing that we think of when we think of Nokia is going
away, you know, is going to Microsoft.

Leo: Yeah that, I think, is important, and I always say this wrong.
They didn’t buy Nokia, they bought Nokia’s phone
business.

Paul: No, they bought Nokia. They bought the soul of Nokia. I mean,
come on.

Mary Jo: No… come on…

Leo: Well that’s what Nokia’s at pains to say…

Paul: It’s like a rotting husk back there… They have a Here mapping
business that’s good for tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of dollars of revenue
a year, and you know, the…

Mary Jo: How about the Patent Licensing business?

Paul: Yeah, yeah, ok, that’s probably worth something.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: But come on, patent licensing? I’d rather talk about Yahoo
than talk about a patent licensing company. There’s not a lot–

Mary Jo: It’s going to make a lot of money, especially if they
start suing people over their own patents.

Leo: Right, that’s right… Could be big business!

Mary Jo: I know. It’s a weird thing, but it could be a big business
for them.

Paul: The Lumia stuff is actually ok. I don’t know how this started
to happen, and I don’t know that this was the first time, but it was weird that
people focused on the fact that quarter Lumia sales actually dropped. That’s
not usually how you measure such things. Usually, you compare them year over
year, and year over year, they were up pretty big. That’s been the trend for
them ever since they released the first Lumia. This is not the first time Nokia
sold fewer Lumias quarter over quarter. So, it’s not
notable in that sense. That has happened in the past. The big question here, of
course, is: Microsoft is going to suck this stuff in, and what is it going to
look like on the other side? A lot of 30,000 plus employees are coming to Microsoft, they obviously have manufacturing facilities,
design facilities, employees of all stripes who do different things… They’ve
got devices that they’re going to announce, no doubt, next month at the Global
World Congress… I don’t know. Right now, Microsoft sells two Surfaces and an
Xbox. In a month or two, they’re going to have eighty-one Nokia devices. A lot of stuff.

Mary Jo: I know. It’s going to be interesting, how this all shakes
out, and how Microsoft deals with the branding (Nokia vs. Lumia vs. Asha). There’s all those rumors out there, where we keep seeing
screen shots of some kind of phone that’s based on Android, that is supposedly
an Asha phone, and supposedly is called the Nokia X (based on stuff that EVleaks is publishing). So there’s a lot of big question marks about how their product lines are going to
integrate once they do become a single company. You know, it was funny to see,
when Nokia announced that their Windows Phone sales for that quarter were off
from the previous quarter, I saw a few people saying “You know what? I wonder
if they did this intentionally, because no one wanted to say ‘We have to sell
to Microsoft, because we had such a successful business,’ so they had to show
that they had an unsuccessful business…”

Paul: There you go. That’s–

Mary Jo: Foil hat time, right, [laughs]

Paul: [laughing] That’s good.

Mary Jo: But I say people saying that, and I was like “Uh, I don’t
know, that’s going a little far…” The two numbers, though, that
were hard to reconcile... I don’t know if you saw this, Paul… Joe Belfiore came onto Twitter after Nokia’s numbers came out,
and said “Well, we had a really huge quarter for Windows Phone activations in
the fourth calendar quarter…” So people were trying to make sense of that. If
this was the most Windows Phone activations that ever–

Paul: That they ever sold.

Mary Jo: – that there ever were, how could Nokia actually have sold
fewer Windows Phones? Nokia phones are like eighty or ninety percent of the
whole Windows Phone base.

Paul: Ok, I’m just going to give a theory, because I actually have
no idea…

Mary Jo: Me neither.

Paul: I wonder if Nokia doesn’t register a sale where Microsoft
does when they sell it in a different channel–

Mary Jo: That could be it.

Paul: – and that those devices have been sitting in distribution
centers or retailers and they were sold in the fourth quarter.

Mary Jo: That could be.

Paul: To customers, right. So maybe some of the sales we saw from
Q3 last year were, in fact, delivered to customers in Q4F. Just
a guess.

Mary Jo: Yeah, that could be.

Leo: Alright… I don’t know how long this show has been, because a
lot of it has been mincing around with Mary Jo, but we’re going to have–

Paul: It’s been seven-and-a-half minutes so far.

Leo: Yeah, we’ve really done a few things, but I do want to take a
little break. Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, we’re
talking about Microsoft and Windows. Windows 8.1 Update 1, inches closer, we’ll
talk about that… Surface: those updates just keep on coming! Office,
Windows Phone, Cortana, perhaps?All coming up in just a bit. Our show today brought to you
by our good friends at ShareFile. I saw the “S,” SquareSpace is coming up in a second. ShareFile is the place to share files. We were talking about this a bit ago. This is kind
of the best of both worlds. It’s from Citrix and it’s business-focused, so it’s a very easy way to share files without emailing them.
Business-appropriate, but is easy to be used as some of those consumer
solutions. In fact, there’s an Outlook plug-in that makes it look just like you’re
attaching to an email. Obviously, you don’t want to email attachments, although
nowadays, in business, practically every business email includes some sort of
attachment (a PowerPoint presentation, spreadsheet, contracts, a document, or
some other…). That’s not the way to do
it! It’s not secure, anybody can read it along the
way. It’s also prone to bounce-backs – you don’t know how big a file their
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it’s cloud storage, too. [This] happens to me all the time, I use ShareFile to share audio files with radio
stations. “Hi, this is Leo Laporte. I’m in Tucson.
I’m listening to the radio,” or whatever that is. We send those to the local
radio stations via ShareFile. They get a link – they
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need to log in. They just click the link, download the file… It’s very easy for
them. It’s very easy for me to keep track of what they’re doing. I can “expire”
those files, I can say “That’s only good for a month (or a year, or it never expires),” I can say how many times they can download it… Just fabulous. By the way, what I do is, I have a ShareFile folder that automatically syncs with the ShareFile app, so I can just put the files in the folder
and then I have them on my phone if I forget. For instance, and this happens
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Only one of them helps me. So don’t click the big green button that says “Start
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here, this little tiny (I really wish they’d make this bigger), this little
tiny text that says “Podcast Listeners Click Here,” and that little microphone…
If you would, I know, please just dome a favor: click that link, and when they ask, say “Windows” as the code. That way,
everybody will know where you heard it. It would help us greatly if you’d do
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Paul: [laughing] It should be!

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: [laughs]

Leo: [makes sound of cat mewing] sharefile.com… We thank ShareFile for their support of Windows Weekly… Windows 8.1
Update 1, the latest news.

Mary Jo: Yes… The latest news is, if
Microsoft holds to its current plan, we may see this sooner than a lot of us
were thinking. It may actually come out on March 11th–

Leo: Wow.

Mary Jo: – which is Patch Tuesday. So that’s kind of curious too.
There were rumors that Microsoft might deliver Update 1 via a Windows Update –
I was waiting to see – but now I’m hearing from my contacts: “Yes, that is the
plan.”

Leo: Really?!

Mary Jo: And that’s how they’re going to get it out to people.

Leo: So, next month, or two months I guess, it will show up. Will
it show up as a Critical Update? Will it show up as an Optional Update? I
presume it would be optional…

Mary Jo: I’ve heard “Optional Update” on March 11th, and
then the next month on Patch Tuesday, which I think April 8th or
April 9th, it could show up as a Critical Update. At least
“Important;” I don’t know if it will be “Critical.”

Leo: They’ll never require it, will they? Or will they?

Mary Jo: Good question.

Leo: Traditionally, Microsoft has not done that.

Paul: Required it?

Leo: Yeah. I mean, traditionally an update like that is…

Paul: Somebody told me that this thing was basically analogous to
what we used to call a “Feature Pack.”

Leo: Right.

Paul: In that the distinction here is that Service Packs are obviously to fix
problems, and a Feature Pack (or what we now are calling an “Update,” for some
reason) is more of a functional update. With Service Packs, they reach a point
where the support for the OS requires a certain Service Pack level, right, so
with Windows 7 they only released one, but it would be “Windows 7 with Service
Pack 1…” XP, today through April, is Service Pack 3… I don’t think Windows 8.1
will be around enough for it to matter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this
became what constituted the “base install” of Windows going forward, until
Windows 9 ships. So in that sense, I think you’re going to get this on new
computers. In fact I think somebody told me that that was the case.

Leo: So, new computers will ship with Update 1 starting… March?

Paul: Yeah whenever… April.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: And you’ll get getting it as an Update in March, and maybe Required or Critical in April.

Paul: I wouldn’t be surprised if it became Critical over time.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: So, there are some Security things in it… It’s not merely a
Feature Pack, there are some…

Paul: Actually, that I don’t know.

Leo: You don’t want to require a Feature Pack, it’s just a feature pack…

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Paul: Take the features!

Leo: Take it!

Paul: Take them!

Leo: Take it!

Mary Jo: The reason you might want to require it is because of some
of the things that are in there, in terms of how apps are now going to behave,
that’s going to change. So if you’re trying to standardize on a version of
Windows 8, or you’re a developer and you’re trying to build for the operating
system, you want to make sure everybody is on the same page as to how apps
open, how they work… So, I can see why they might do that. It’s not as
far-fetched as it might seem.

Leo: You’re getting some leaks now on some of the features of
Update 1, not Service Pack 1, Update 1…

Mary Jo: Right.

Leo: Paul, I saw you had an article on the mouse…

Paul: Yeah, and I… It’s hard to keep track of when this stuff
happened, but a week or so ago we had written some stuff about some leaks at
the time, and I talked to a source at Microsoft. He told me a couple things,
and one of them didn’t make sense to me so I wrote about the other, the other
had to do with mouse usage in Windows 8.1 and so forth. He was talking about
this notion that there would be these Contexts menus, and he specifically said
“apps.” They way I took that, although I didn’t write
about it at the time because it wasn’t making sense to me… He said that they
had a very crude Contexts menu that you could click with the mouse, and instead
of it bring up the normal Metro UI (which is those app
bars), it brings up a menu, like you would see on the Desktop. And it turns out
this is in fact exactly what’s happening. It’s for the Start screen and the
Apps screen, which is that thing that’s below the Start screen.

Leo: Right.

Paul: So, when he said “apps,” he meant the Apps screen, not
“apps.” When you go into an app, and you right-click,
the App bar will come up. So what I had originally written in this article was
that they were going to be adding this feature to apps – you know, like
applications – and that’s not the case.

Leo: Within an app… No…

Paul: Yeah.

Leo: You know, I like this behavior on the Start screen, and Apps
menu I guess, because in the past it’s given this kind of non-intuitive,
drag-it-down, and you do this little doodle-y dance…

Paul: I like this too, because people that use a mouse are used to
this behavior. In fact–

Leo: This is how it should be, yeah.

Paul: I would argue that should, in fact, add this to apps.

Leo: I agree.

Paul: Meaning applications, and that is something they could do
seamlessly, without any interaction from developers, because they know what–

Leo: So I could right-click on–

Paul: – buttons will come up.

Leo: Right.

Paul: When that’s put them in a menu.

Leo: Put them there… I can right-click on tile in the Start screen
now, and unpin it directly from the Context menu that pops up, or pin it, or
uninstall it, or re-size it…

Paul: Because now those things are disconnected. You know, you go
up to a tile, and maybe the tile is way up in the right corner of the screen,
and you right-click on it to select it. To perform an action on that thing, you
then have to move the mouse all the way down into the lower left corner, where
those options are, and it’s a weird-ism of the Metro thing that that working ok
when you’re holding a device, and you’re touching it, but it makes no sense for
the mouse.

Leo: If I press and hold, will I get the same Context menu? With my finger?

Paul: With the mouse?

Leo: With my finger.

Paul: Oh no, no. I think this is mouse-only.

Leo. Mouse-only.

Mary Jo: Right. A lot of the things–

Paul: You’ll–

Mary Jo: I was going to say, a lot of the things in this update are
meant specifically for mouse–

Leo: Mouse.

Mary Jo: Mouse users.

Paul: Yeah, that we’ve seen, yeah.

Mary Jo: Mousers. [laughs] Yeah.

Leo: Is it too much for me to… Ok, am I completely off-base? Press
and hold should be the same as a right click?

Paul: That is roughly true, yes.

Leo: So shouldn’t a Context menu pop up if I press and hold?

Paul: No, because that’s a mouse interface. That’s what I mean… I
think the thing that’s nice about this is that is respects the interaction
type. So, if you press and hold on a tile… let me just bring this up on a touch
screen, so that I can do that, and not just talk about it… It’s kind of
strange, because if you press and hold, it brings up the normal App Bar
interface, which is kind of normal… I think that when you think about the way
multi-touch works, usually there’s not a screen floating in space, where you’re
touching it with a finger. Usually, you’re holding it. So when you’re holding
it, one finger is here where those options are going to be. So if you’re using
this finger to select stuff, you have this other hand over here that typically
is going to be where those options are, and…

Leo: So the App Bar is not going away, it will still be there in
touch, but when you’re using a mouse you can also right click…

Paul: That’s what I mean. It’s context-sensitive in the sense that,
depending on what type of input device you’re using, it acts differently. But
only the Start menu and the Apps screen. [pause] It’s
a step, Leo. It’s a step.

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: The other thing that they’re going to change–

Paul: The journey is the reward, Leo.

Mary Jo: I like that they’re putting the Power button and the
Search button up near where–

Paul: Yeah, where the User thing is…

Mary Jo: – your name is. Where the User was.

Paul: Is there room for a clock over there? Because I don’t
understand–

Mary Jo: Ah, I would love to have a clock over there…

Paul: – why that screen doesn’t have a clock.

Mary Jo: I know, it’s so annoying.

Paul: It’s so crazy.

Mary Jo: So annoying!

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah, so they’re doing lots of things to make it easier
for people who are traditional “Desktop/mouse/keyboard users” to feel more at
home with Windows 8.1 with Update 1. One thing they’re doing under the covers,
that is more of an OEM feature, is they are going to reduce the memory and the
disk-space requirements for Windows, supposedly, as part of this update too.
And that’s not something that users are going to care or see as much, it’s more
meant to make the operating system work better on cheaper, smaller tablets. So
it’s more–

Paul: Well, also just to prevent that SSD shock thing that occurs
when you buy a thirty-two gig storage and have eleven gigs free, you know, or
whatever the number is.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: I think that’s been a big stink with the Surface devices in
particular, but the other Windows devices, you know, thirty-two, sixty-four
gigs of storage… get the thing home, and there’s no free space.

Mary Jo: Yep.

Leo: So, shrinking that footprint…

Mary Jo: Yep.

Paul: Yep.

Leo. Yep.

Mary Jo: So, the game plan in March 11th.
Things can change, still. If they decide it’s not ready, they could push it
back until the April patch Tuesday, but right now that’s supposedly the target,
the ship target.

Leo: Surface! Which is not the opposite of “Dive!”
[laughs] Maybe it is the same, I don’t know.

Paul: I feel like a lot of positive things have happened at
Microsoft over the past year, and this Surface lack-of-communication thing is
just like the whole Sinofsky era all over again. I just feel bad about it, it
was so unnecessary. They really kind of shot themselves in the foot there.

Leo: So Mary Jo has wrapped it all up, and explained to us all:
What the hell happened?

Mary Jo: I tried… although today I found out there are some things
I have to change in that article yet again…

Leo: Aw man..aw man… You just published it yesterday!

Mary Jo: I know!

Paul. Is it February yet?

Leo: [laughs]

Mary Jo: No… Here’s one of the reasons this is so complicated:
Microsoft is updating four different Surfaces, or Surfii,
or whatever we’re calling them… Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro,
Surface 2 and Surface RT (which they call just the plain old “Surface” now). Some of these are running Windows 8.1, and some are running Windows 8.0… I can
imagine this could get even more complicated when we have Update 1 come out…

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: So they’re updating all these things differently, based on
which operating system, on which hardware you’re running. Not everybody gets
the same set of updates across all of these devices. Each one of these
different configurations gets different updates. If you look at my list, there
are things they updated on the Surface Pro 2 that are different from what they
did on the Surface Pro, that are different from what they did on Surface 2...
We’ve gone over a lot of these on previous episodes of Windows Weekly, but the
main things to know about the Surface Pro 2, which I just found out today, is
there was one firmware update that went out this month for everybody, for
Surface Pro 2, whether you got the faulty December firmware update or you
didn’t. Everybody now supposedly has the same firmware update fix as of January
on their machines.

Leo: Right on, daddy-o!

Paul: How confident do you feel about that one?

[laughter]

Mary Jo: Uh, I don’t–

Paul: Just curious…

Mary Jo: – feel that confident…

Leo: You said that kind of hesitantly, yeah…

Mary Jo: I know…

Paul: It just seems like something you should be able to say
confidently, but…

Mary Jo: We’ve heard so many different iterations of this story,
right? At first, it was like some people are getting one patch and some were
getting a different patch, and then some also are getting things called
“Hardware Updates,” which I found out today are just driver updates.

Leo: Ah! That’s not hardware!

Paul: I know. How disappointing.

Mary Jo: [sighs] Yeah…

Leo: [laughing] I guess you can’t really push the Hardware Update…

Paul: I just was staring at it… It’s like waiting for toast to happen, maybe the hardware will change in front of my eyes…

Leo: My screen resolution has doubled!!

Paul: My Surface Pro got thinner!

Leo: Thank you, Microsoft! It’s a miracle!

Mary Jo: The good news is we’re almost done with January, so at
least the January updates are done. There should be some more February ones
coming… [laughs]

Leo: Oh, wow…

Paul: Wow.

Mary Jo: Yeah. The one thing that did not get fixed, by the way, in
this month of updates, (because I’ve had a few people ask me about this) was
there is a micro SD card issue for the Surface Pro 2, and I believe that none
of the updates that anybody got fixed that.

Paul: What is the issue?

Mary Jo: Something to do with battery life, I believe, or when you
have a micro SD card in, somehow your battery drops to zero, I’m thinking…

Paul: Wow.

Mary Jo: I can’t remember exactly, although I bet somebody in the
chat room will. But whatever that micro SD card was, if I could find my
article… I wrote so many on Surface updates this month
I can’t even find all of my articles!

Leo: [barks] “You look like you’re looking for articles!” [laughs] Can I help?

Mary Jo: Where’s Clippie?! I want my Clippie…

Leo: I need my articles…

Mary Jo: But anyway, that’s it for your Surface. All those updates
should be out this month, and supposedly they’re getting it back on track.
Let’s see…

Leo: What is this “Windows 2-in-1 PC”?

Paul: So, this is sort of the general term that people use to
describe a Surface device, right? It’s a device that–

Leo: It’s a tablet and a
computer…

Paul: Yeah. And they take different forms. I actually tend to think
of them as “hybrid PCs,” but that picture there is like Lenovo Yoga-type
machine, where you get the screen that flips over.

Leo: Right, right…

Paul: And you don’t detach the screen from the keyboard, but it
still becomes sort of a tablet, but sometimes–

Leo: It’s a picture frame, it’s a laptop…

Paul: Yeah, right. It’s a floor wax, it’s all those things. I’m
going to be looking at these things again. I had sort of decided last year,
after a lot of back-and-forth on this, you know, the two generations of 201s
that we saw, and of course mini tablets appeared last year finally as well… I
don’t know. I always sort of saw this as the future of the PC, and maybe more
specifically the future of the Ultrabook. It’s
interesting to me, how much resistance there is with PC users, for these kinds
of devices. Actually, Mary Jo is a good example of this.

Mary Jo: I am.

Paul: She wants – you want a new computer, you’re not interested in
multi-touch, you don’t care if the thing flips around and can be used as a
tablet… And I think that’s the big questions, you know. The problem here is, if
the 2-in-1 PC is not the future of the PC there is no future for the PC, right?
I mean, where do you go from here? Basically, you just stick with the current
designs and… I don’t know. It’s kind a low-volume
thing there. The 2-in1s have not, to my mind (or at least from what I’ve seen),
have not taken off in any appreciable way so far. This is something I'm sort of openly wondering
about.

Mary Jo: You know, I think
it's like we talk about a lot on Windows Weekly, everybody's use case of a PC
is very different. For me, I need something I can type on my lap with and
that's not something everybody needs. Even though Surface is supposed to be
"lappable"... A lot of these two-in-one
hybrid things say they also can be used on your lap, there's nothing as good on
a lap for a lot of consistent typing is a PC, a Clamshell PC.

Paul: Right.

Mary Jo: I know that my use
case is very different from a lot of people. How many other
people sit for hours at a time, typing, not that many. So for me, it
makes sense.

Paul: I think I had
thrown the notion of yoga by you actually recently, and you weren't interested
because you heard it was a touch machine and could flip around and turn around
and turn into a tablet. But I mean, does that make the
device less viable? Because you don't have to use it that
way. You never know. It seems like for testing purposes it would be
useful.

Mary Jo: No, I'm one of
those people who, I've never been a converged device person. I'm like someone
who would still prefer to use a Zune HD over a phone to listen to music because
I think you should use the best tool for the best job. I still use my Kindle Paperwhite to read, even though I could read on my Surface.
I don't know, and I know I'm not like everybody but I just don't really want a
device that's not good at one thing, I want something to be the best at the one
thing.

Paul: Right, yeah okay.
I wrote something very similar to this last year and I've spent a lot of time
fighting with this very issue and as last year drew to a close, I still use the
same non-multi touch Ultrabook I've been using for a
year and a half. If I want to read a book, I have a Kindle, if I want to watch
a movie, I have a tablet. I have a smartphone, obviously, I guess it's a little ponderous having that many devices, but each
of them seems to do something really well.

Mary Jo: Yeah, you say what's the future, if it's not the two-in-one. Well, how
about a future of at least, one really great Ultrabook?
That would be awesome. I'd like to have that as an option and see some people
do a little more innovation around Ultrabook.

Leo: Do those not
exist?

Mary Jo: They do, but I've
been looking, as you guys know because I've brought it up on the show a lot,
for the next PC that I want to buy and I find a lot of different Ultrabooks but there's always something wrong with each
one. It's either they're so prohibitively expensive for what you get, or the
battery life is so so because it has a touchscreen
that I don't even care if I use.

Paul: The good ones are
always very expensive, that's definitely true.

Leo: Well so the Carbon touch, well you don't want touch, so the Carbon X one.

Mary Jo: Yeah, maybe.

Leo: What do you think?

Paul: Well it's still
$1500-$2000, depending on what you've got. They're expensive.

Mary Jo: I don't mind
spending for something that's really great but when I do get to see one in a
store somewhere, I'll be like oh well this one has really sharp edges, or this
one doesn't bend back far enough. There's always something about each one that
makes me say I can't spend 2000 bucks if I don't love the thing.

Paul: Aside from my
ambivalence about Samsung, I actually really do like the Samsung that I do
have. I think the modern versions of this now have super high res screens and
multi-touch. I don't know that you can get one without the touch, but I don't
think touch being on the screen is going to hurt-It's not like a flip-around
device, it's still like a laptop, you know.

Mary Jo: Right. I'm just
kind of discouraged about the battery life on all of these things because it
feels like since we've introduced a touch idea in Windows laptops, and I don't
know if it's because of touch, if it's because of all of these new sensors, or
what it's exactly because of, our
battery life is getting worse instead of better. It's a problem.

Leo: You're right,
everything sucks.

Mary Jo: Everything sucks!

Paul: Why are we in this
business?

Mary Jo: Now I'm holding
out hope I'm going to find a good laptop.

Leo: I think a nice Macbook Air would do you great.

Paul: Well you know
what? Here's the thing, a couple problems here. Macbook Air, in theory is a great machine. Two problems, two big problems. One is the sharpness of edge thing that she was talking about, Macs are awful
for that and Air is particularly. The other one is, it's a great laptop if you want Mac OS10, but if you want to run Windows, it
will run Windows, but does not run it well. And that great battery life you get
Mac OS10 disappears, the efficiency is gone, and a lot of it is not because
Windows sucks, it's because Apple provides these really substandard drivers and
there's no way to get around it. It's just unfortunate, you know, I've heard
people say that Macs were a better PC, it's a better
PC for Windows. And it's not, it really isn't. I mean, you'll get things like
the fan kicking in all the time on a Macbook Air when
using Windows, that doesn't happen while running Mac OS10. It's just not an
efficient way to do it and it's too bad because I would have bought a Macbook Air a year and a half ago.

Leo: Yeah, I don't run
Windows on it primarily so I don't have much experience.

Paul: And it's nice that
the option is there, but if you're going to run Windows, that's not a good
choice.

Leo: Is the Acer Aspire
S7 too expensive for you? This is my Windows machine, but it has touch. Would
you say I'm not going to buy it because it has touch?

Mary Jo: No, I would take
it. It just wouldn't be something I'm seeking out.

Paul: You would just
never touch it.

Mary Jo: I would probably
never touch it, yeah.

Leo: It would probably
be too sharp for you, it is so thin.

Mary Jo: Is it?

Leo: That's why I like it, it's thinner than a Macbook Air.

Paul: Do you have it
there with you now?

Leo: No, it's at home.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, it's
a pretty machine.

Leo: It's really
beautiful. It's thin, these are Haswell. Some of the
things I didn't like about the previous generation was they fixed the keyboard
and the mouse, the screen is gorgeous. Somebody is saying that it's a better
laptop than the Macbook Air. So I would look at that
one, I've been very happy with my S7.

Mary Jo: You know, I'm holding out because you never can find the perfect
machine, right? There's always going to be something.

Leo: I'm actually
impressed by the variety and quality of machines out there.

Paul: You're not still
running XP, are you Mary Jo?

Mary Jo: I am, don't tell
anybody.

Paul: I knew it.

Leo: Is this why you're
looking?

Mary Jo: No. I am looking
because my laptop that I use on the road is a core duo, believe it or not.

Leo: Yeah, it's time.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: It's time.

Leo: That means it's
heavy and battery life is terrible too.

Mary Jo: No, my battery
life is great. Because it's an Asus, I'm still getting like 5-6 hours of
battery life on that thing. But it's slow, it's getting slow.

Paul: A lot of these
machines you can get 11-12 hours, depending on the machine.

Leo: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Sigh.

Paul: Could you cue the
Charlie Brown sad music?

Leo: Do you have a
deadline Mary Jo? I mean, is this going to have to happen at some point?

Mary Jo: It has to happen
pretty soon, relatively soon. I was thinking I was going to get it last year
but it didn't work out so now-

(Charlie Brown's sad music chimes in, humoring
everyone)

Leo: They should have
played that at the beginning of the earning conference call, "The PC
market is eroding faster than we thought..'

(Charlie Brown sad music plays again)

Mary Jo: I'm going to get
one soon.

Leo: It will be fun to
talk about it when you get it, why you chose it and all of that. Somebody in
the chatroom says, "No CEO talk?" We
haven't mentioned...

Paul: No, I guess we
don't really have anythi-

Leo: Nothing to say,
right?

Mary Jo: The only thing to
say is, a report that just came out this afternoon
from Bloomberg TV, who was it that was rumored, Vesterburg?
According to one unnamed person, he said he is not interested in the Microsoft
job. Well, I don't know how to rank that in terms of denial or non-denial. He
hasn't said it publicly still.

Leo: Somebody said
Dvorak is going to be right, there were some rumors
that John Thompson, the man in charge of the CEO search, would finally pull a
Dick Cheney and say-

Paul: I've looked, and I
think I am the best choice.

Leo: He wouldn't be a bad
choice, right?

Paul: Oh, I think he'd
be a great choice.

Mary Jo: He is very
qualified.

Leo: It might be the
only guy that has enough knowledge to do it.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: I think Kara
Swisher was the one who asked him early on in the search, if he would consider
it and he said no, but that still doesn't mean no.

Leo: That's what Dick
Cheney said early on in the search.

Mary Jo: Right.

Paul: Although, arguably
being the CEO of Microsoft is a little more complex than being the Vice
President of the United States.

Leo: Oh, a lot more, a
lot more! A lot less fishing involved.

Mary Jo: A different kind
of fishing.

Leo: Or hunting. Put
down that shotgun Mr. Cheney. Let's talk about Office in general. We've got
some- By the way, we've got a name. OneDrive.

Paul: Yeah, that will
never come under any legal scrutiny.

Leo: They own
"one". Actually, you know what? It's a good name, a better name than Skydrive.

Paul: I agree. I like
it, I like it a lot. That's the best part about it.

Leo: The background,
everybody knows this probably, but the background is the Rupert Murdoch Sky TV
sued, and said we own the sky. So Microsoft said oooh, okayyy. Don't hit me!

Paul: It turns out
Microsoft owns half of the bindery member system.

Leo: One is not the
loneliest number nowadays. Xbox One is a good name, and I think OneDrive is actually a great name!

Paul: I do too. Windows
One, by the way, not a good name. I hope they don't go nuts and do the dot net-

Leo: That wouldn't be
good.

Paul: It's like
Microsoft's starting over again, Microsoft One. You can just rent the jokes
that will occur if they re-brand anything else with One.

Leo: And the business Skydrive Pro will be renamed OneDrive for business.

Paul: Not OneDrive Pro.

Leo: Pro isn't a good
name, frankly.

Paul: No, because it
doesn't reflect what's really happening.

Leo: It's not meaningful, it sounds like you're teaching golf for a
living.

Paul: I also think that
it gives them the ability- Well, they do this now, I think. But if you're in
the business version of Office 365 and you look up at the menu, it would say Skydrive, not Skydrive Pro, they
were using Skydrive as like a, think Skydrive, think storage. You know? So I bet they will just
transition that nicely, it will say OneDrive for
business, we'll just say OneDrive. It's a good brand.

Leo:OneDrive. Also, Paul has some updates to Outlook. Particularly the web app UI.

Paul: Yeah, and actually
that's part of what you're looking at now in the OneDrive app, right? Like the UI change is starting to kind of come out.

Leo: Yeah this is OneNote-

Paul: It still says
OneNote web app but the rumor is that this is changing to-

Mary Jo: I really hope they
do the online branding part of this too and they change the things that are
currently called Office Web Apps to Office online.

Leo: So much more
sense.

Mary Jo: I think that would
be a great branding move, yeah. And the other thing, if they do this,
supposedly one of the ways they're going to change things is, if I'm trying to
tell my mom how to compose something in Word Web App, I'm like okay, first you
have to go to Sky Drive, then hit the Create tab, and then you have to do this,
and it's not easy. Supposedly if they do this rebranding like we're hearing of
the web apps online, you're going to go to office.com and there's going to be a
place that says you want to use Word on the web click here, want to use Excel
on the web click here. How awesome would that be? That would be great!

Leo: Sensible.

Paul: Yeah, it makes
sense. The first time I saw that I was like this is kind of a fine line between
web apps and online, but actually, yeah I think you're right. I think this is a
much simpler and better branding.

Mary Jo: Just so much
easier to find it, and use it, and you always know
where to go.

Paul: One thing though,
they appear to be screwing up, and this is a problem today too is, outlook.com.
Like, this whole brand is a terrible name in some ways because outlook is the
name of an application that is part of the desktop version of Office. Outlook
web app, which used to be Outlook web access, is a web-based email front end to
exchange and so you see it in Office 365 for business. Then they have this
thing called outlook.com, which it used to be Hotmail and is based on
completely different technology. It looks like in the new branding they're just
going to start calling it Outlook. It's like guys, seriously. They need to find
out some way to differentiate outlook.com from Outlook web app, or whatever
they call that, from Outlook, the application that is a part Microsoft Office.
They have too many things called Outlook. It's a good brand, I get it. But
they're kind of abusing it.

Leo: Overloading it,
perhaps.

Paul: Yeah.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: Making it do too
much work. But the Office online, that's real, they are going to call it that
or no?

Mary Jo: I have screen
shots of it from one of my sources, but they haven't announced that they're
going to do that.

Leo: And I didn't know
this but it was one year ago, today, Office 365 came out. I bought it
immediately.

Paul: Yeah, me too. And
this is a little delayed, I've been meaning to do a
post about all of the stuff they've added to Office 365 in the past year. But
the new business versions came out in February, Office 365, the business
service has been around since, I want to say 2011. And of course, before that,
they had something called Business Productivity online services, I can't believe I got rid of that brand. This thing has kind of existed as a
set of online services for a while, the thing we think of as Office 365 today,
you know, came out last year, the big bet. I think the
two big parts of this are the Home Premium version, which shipped on this day a
year ago, and then the Small Business Premium. It was essentially the small
business version of Office Home Premium where you get the five licenses per
user. I think that's the biggest thing, it just isn't so much the online
service aspect of it, as it is the licensing nicety of it. Something that used
to be really expensive and unattainable, is now kind of a no-brainer from a
cross perspective.

Leo: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: It's crazy how far
that came, in one release.

Leo: It's also
interesting because Adobe kind of did the same thing with the photoshop and the creative cloud and they made it a monthly
subscription, which you kind of had to do.

Paul: Yeah, but they
didn't make it $99!

Leo: There's the
difference, yeah!

Paul: Across multiple
people in a family-

Leo: It tends to create
a cloud, compared to the acceptance of I'm going to call it Office Online. It's
dramatic, people seem to like Office- What did you just say? 25%
adoption rate in business?

Paul: 60% of the fortune
500.

Leo: It's doing very
well.

Paul: Yeah, 3.5 million
consumers.

Leo: Is there a time
frame for the office online name change?

Paul: I bet it's very
soon.

Leo: Do it all at once,
do one drive, everything. All at once.

Mary Jo: Yeah, I think
it'll be around that time.

Paul: I bet this happens very quick, maybe in tandem with the OneDrive switchover.

Mary Jo: Maybe in tandem
with Windows 8.1 update One.

Paul: Yeah. Which
actually probably should have that One drive branding
in it, when you think about it.

Paul: Likely fake,
actually though I have a note in here that Windows phone 8.1 has not really
leaked in any appreciable way, I mean we saw a picture of a notification center
and we know a couple of basic things about it but I've been trying to find out
anything I could about Windows phone 8.1, there really is a lot out there. And
someone from Microsoft just told me that this thing looks fake, people are
calling it fake, and the guy said he faked it or whatever it was but it appears
to be based on what it's supposed to look like. The way he described it to me,
I'm not saying it's real, but don't automatically
assume that's not kind of what it's going to be.

Leo: That's
interesting. The tweet that announced it is gone.

Paul: Sure, sure. That from the WP leaks or whatever it's called.

Leo: Something like that, yeah. So, there you go. When
you delete the tweet, that's a sign.

Mary Jo: Yeah, this is very
intriguing. This is news from today at the open compute project Summit out in
San Jose. There's a whole group of people who are backing Arm server
development and the other backers are red hats who say Cononical,
HP, Dell, and then you get Microsoft thrown in there. And Microsoft has never
said that they are porting Windows server to Arm, so that's throwing a few
people through a loop and seeing does this mean now that we are going to
Windows server running on Arm. Microsoft hasn't really said at all, why they're
participating, other than they're interested in what happens in the server
world and they just want to make sure, given they are partners with some of
these companies who are in the coalition, that they are on board with where
they're going.

Leo: So what are the
issues according to the key note is that there are multiple OS's on these
multiple different systems on a chip's version of Arm, so it's kind of a lot of
overlap right now.

Mary Jo: Yeah.

Leo: But I don't think
they're going to settle on Microsoft, they're going to settle on Lennox, right?
I would guess.

Mary Jo: You would think,
maybe that's why they're in there. Just to make sure they're not left out.

Leo: Yeah, just to have
a vote in the-

Mary Jo: Yeah, and speaking
of the open compute, the other big news this week- So Facebook has been the big
backer of this thing called the Open Compute Project. Which is supposed to help
people who want to design servers that are kind of like no brand servers that
are cheaper and better suited for running data centers. Microsoft joined that
project this week and they actually open-sourced some of their own data center
designs. And the reason that's interesting to users, is say you're someone who
is building your own data center in house, as an IT Administrator, you're now
going to have access to these designs, if you want them so you can see how
Microsoft builds its own servers in its gigantic data centers to see if there's
any lessons, any kind of specifications, or reference designs that may be
useful to you in terms of bringing down the cost in your own data centers.

Leo: I really love this
trend. Facebook did it, Google did it, now Microsoft is doing it and these, of
course, are companies that really have to scale. So I think it's fascinating,
and it's great that they're doing that. It's not secret sauce anymore,
probably.

Mary Jo: It kind of is
though in a way, if you think about it. Like, how much money did Microsoft
spend to come up with these designs? I mean, it took them years to perfect this
and now they run these mega data centers. And I think a lot of reason they're
probably backing this whole play is that it's Facebook, and they're trying to
be very tightly aligned with Facebook.

Leo: Right. Facebook
says the Open Compute Project helped save it $1.2 billion in infrastructure
over the last 3 years, this is according to Runningwithscissors,
in our chatroom. This is important stuff, you know,
this is meaningful for all of us because we're all using those servers, we're
the users. So keeping the cost down, the power use down is really important.
Thank you Microsoft, for participating there, I think.

Paul: By the way there
is one important news story we didn't cover, which is the headline: Kansas Man
Runs into Burning Home to Save Xbox.

Leo: But, was it a 360
or a One?

Paul: I don't know, but
a bunch of people have sent me this on Twitter over the past couple of days.

Leo: See, the
mainstream news never really tells you the things you want to know.

Paul: Well, I have the
follow-up which was: If it was a PS4, he would've let it burn.

Leo: Oh, Paul. Oh,
Paul. Paul, Paul Paul. Such a partisan!

Paul: Well when it comes
to Xbox Leo, what can I say?

Leo: You know what I'll
be honest.. I would probably run in to save my Mac
Pro.

Paul: I would save
basically, like a home server that I have that has important data. I'd probably
go for that.

Mary Jo: One time in one of
my last apartments, I had a radiator explode in my apartment and the first
thing I did was grab my laptop and I ran out of the building with it. And I was
standing outside and I'm like, wait! What about everything else in my
apartment?

Leo: Wow.

Paul: I forgot my
shoes...

Mary Jo: I know.

Leo: I'm naked, but
I've got my laptop!

Paul: That natural
reaction is so very telling because you can sort of sit here and talk about
what's important to you, but I think that shows-

Leo: No, I'm grabbing
my laptop. Exactly.... And I'm well backed-up.

Paul: I feel like I'm
pretty well backed-up, that's why grabbing the home server in many ways would
just be a convenience. Because the truth is, all of that stuff is backed-up.
It'd be a stupid and risky thing, to try to pull that off.

Leo: Let's take a
break, when we come back we got beer, we've got enterprise, we've got all sorts
of stuff because you know, it's Windows Weekly, friends. And that's what we
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were, I can tell.

Paul: My book blogs are.

Leo: The book blogs
are, well there ya' go. Which are Windows 8-

Paul: Phonebook.

Leo: Windowsphonebook.com and windows 8onebook.com.

Paul: Right.

Leo: Let's get a little
tip of the week from Mr. Paul Thurrott.

Paul: Actually speaking
of windows81book.com, in writing the book, you space out whatever the
chapters are going to be and you write them over time, and one of the ones I
had been putting off was one that was going to be dealing with the Bing apps
that are a part of Windows 8 One, the theory being that this is kind of a
boring topic and there's nothing really going on there. Actually, investigating
these apps more deeply than I had in the past, what I discovered is these apps are really kind of
incredible and I'll probably be writing a post to the super site detailing some
of the stuff but it's kind of a high-level overview. Microsoft shipped, I want
to say four or so Bing apps in windows 8, the original version: news, finance, sports, weather, and actually
maps, which has disappeared from Windows. In windows 8 One they added food&drink and health&fitness. Those are like a list of
topics that like if you want other things to do when they're making new apps.
But these apps are actually far more incredible than I think people realize and
most of them share kind of a common navigation scheme beautiful layouts and
stuff like that. Most of them have some sense of favorites, like a web browser
so you could have favorite places in Maps, you could have favorite recipes in Food&Drink perhaps, favorite sports favorite teams and big sports and all that. So there's a lot of
commonality between them, which is cool. They all integrate with the Smart
Search feature in Windows, which is really neat, meaning that when you search
for something you can often click on a link and it actually loads something in
the app, rather than like a webpage somewhere so you get that really rich
experience. But I think the really cool thing about these apps and the thing
that most people probably don't understand is the deep, deep integration that
they have with online integration. I'll provide a few examples, one is that Microsoft has this thing called Health Vault which is an online
service for centralizing your health data. That can be things like your track
and your weight, your blood pressure, maybe you have diabetes or some other
problem, or you're doing exercise tracking whatever it might be and you can go
through this kind of central clearing house if you want to. I just lost video,
by the way.

Leo: Yeah, we turned it
off because it's conserving-

Paul: That's fine. So
why would you want to use something like Microsoft Health Vault? Well you can
use different mobile app or different web apps to do different forms of
tracking today. If you get like a Nike Fuel band like I have, you use the Nike
stuff, and it uploads to some Nike service somewhere that's pretty much locked
into that. But if you're doing like weight tracking in a different app, you're
checking your weight everyday, you can do that, but
those two things never kind of connect up and one of the neat things about
Health Vault is that if you give it permission to, it can provide information
in two different directions. So for example, you can use Bing Health&Fitness to track your weight, your diet, all the
food you eat. But maybe you use like a FitBit device
or one of those devices that are compatible with Health Vault, even though FitBit doesn't connect to Bing Health&Fitness,
it does connect to Health Vault and so that data from your exercise actually
does get pushed forward to Bing Health&Fitness through Health Vault, and it's just kind of a neat back and forth. Likewise,
your profile information, if you set it up in Health Vault, it gets pushed
through to the app of course but this information doesn't go back and forth
between compatible services and devices so there are obviously many medical
devices and many that are compatible with the service so that to me is kind of
incredible. Bing Finance is another example where it integrates with various
brokerage type accounts. Etrade, Fidelity, whatever
the other ones are I know there are a bunch of them. You get this kind of
integration thing where you can sign into your account through the app and can
have a tile on your screen in Windows 8.1 that follows your savings portfolio
or whatever it is, maybe retirement portfolio. Next to one for your favorite
sports team, next to one for the news topic that you're tracking, next to the
one for whatever, you know. All of these Bing apps have these type of capabilities and I just think that whole combined
quality that they have with the integration with each other, with all these
online services many of which don't come from Microsoft, and then the capabilities
that they all have. Pinning, favorites, beautiful layouts and
everything. It's just like this incredible rich resource of stuff and I
don't think anyone even looks at this stuff. Like, I didn't really- Well I used
the news app but I really haven't used these apps too much and in really going
through them for the book, I'm kind of blown away by, again, because you know
in Windows 8, the original four or five, I was really impressed by but, even
the new ones. Which I thought were kind of silly, are actually fairly
incredible apps. Plus, I learned how to make a cocktail out of beer.

Leo: I like the
cocktail app. That's a good app. Well, you can find out all about it as the new
chapter hit Windows81book.com

Paul: Yeah, it's hard
not to go on and on about it because there's so much to it, the chapter is like
47 pages long, so you can get an idea. It's a lot of stuff there.

Leo: By the way, just
news coming from a Neo, and surprise surprise. Turns
out there is a cloud based storage app company that has been around for a
couple of years called One.com. The owner says they're
looking into a lawsuit here.

Paul: Yep.

Leo: Damn! He says I'm
surprised Microsoft didn't do more research before they picked One.

Mary Jo: I'm sure they did.

Paul: And there`s also
something called Ubuntu One, which a lot of people have been freaking out over.

Leo: Yeah, but this is
directly in it's- Actually Ubuntu One is storage,
you're right.

Paul: So is One.com,
apparently.

Leo: They both are.

Paul: I just don't think
it's possible that they didn't know about this stuff.

Leo: Yeah, but you
would've thought Metro and Sky, they would've looked
into those two.

Paul: Right, but after
SkyDrive, now you're renaming SkyDrive. You're going to do the same thing again,, you're going to not look? I think that's part of the
process, right? I mean, I don't think this is going to be-

Leo: It's hard to find
a name that isn't taken, I will be honest with you.
That's why, I mean, I've gone through this, way back in 1994 or '95, we were
looking for a name for the new show on MSNBC and even then, you had to register
not just the name of the show, but the domain name the email and all of that
stuff and then we had to end up calling it The Site.

Paul: I remember.

Leo: Thesite.com
because it was so generic, they could still get it and here we are almost
twenty years later and it's even worse. Allthegoodnamesaretaken.com, it
actually is a website.

Paul: Allthegoodnamesaretaken.com? That would be a great domain name.

Leo: Somebody has it.
Unfortunately he isn't doing anything with it, it says
nothing to see here yet. It said that for like eight years, but he's got the
name. Someday... Microsoft might be looking. Software
pick of the week.

Paul: So this one will
be quicker than the last one. This week, I guess Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto San Andreas for Windows phone and this is interesting
because the mobile version of this game debuted I think in December on iOS and again on Android. This is actually a pretty quick
turn-around time for us to get a game like this. The PC or console version of
this game dates back ten years. It's actually from 2004 if I'm not mistaken.
But yeah, it's just been updated with new graphics and obviously it's been fine
tuned to work on touch based devices. It's not my kind of game, and I don't
mean in like a violence whatever standpoint. It's like
an open-world game, it was one of the early versions
of the first person, open-world type game.

Leo: This is not top
down though, this is the first person.

Paul: Yeah, it's first
person so, interesting. I think a lot of people want to get this. It's
expensive for a mobile game, I think it's like $6.99, but I have a feeling a
lot of people will be very excited to at least give it a shot so I wanted to at
least mention it.

Leo: Absolutely. And
now Mary Jo Foley has the enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo: Yep. The
enterprise pick is Windows In Tune this week. Windows In Tune is Microsoft's device management and security
service. It's a cloud service for managing not just Windows based devices, but
also iOS and Android these days. And what was really
interesting is this week Microsoft opened up publicly about what's coming in
the next versions of In Tune and the reason I seem surprised about that is last
year we couldn't get them to say barely anything about Windows In Tune, even
when they announced the version that was codename, windows in tune e, when they
were actually were shipping it and making it available, we couldn't even get them to tell us
what was in it, feature-wise on the week they were announcing it. Instead this year, they seem
to be taking a different approach and they're telling us that next week they're
going to have a roll-out with a bunch of new features for In Tune, specifically
some changes around how administrators can configure email profiles, some of
the new support that they're adding for iOS 7, mobile
device management, and remote lock and remote password reset for devices, all
being added to In Tune next week for current subscribers. They went one better
this week and actually told us about features they're going to have in Windows In Tune before the end of 2014. This probably isn't the
whole list of everything they're going to add, but they did get fairly specific
in a blog post they put out this week. They talked about some of the new
exchange email inbox management that they're going to be adding, a much deeper
level of email management. Some new application restrictions that they're going
to add, white listing and black listing app supports being added, URL filtering
for web browser management, there's a whole bunch of different things. You can
go to Microsoft's own in the Cloud blog and see the full list of features. I
just thought it was really interesting that this year, instead of doing what
they did last year, keeping us in the dark, they're actually being proactive
and telling us what's coming. Windows In Tune.

Leo: Very nice, and our
codename comes from I think Australia.

Mary Jo: I actually should
ask you guys where this codename came from. ItsBootybay. It's a codename, I think from World of Warcraft.

Leo: Oh.

Mary Jo: I'm like the last
person who should know of this.

Leo: I think you might
be right.

Mary Jo: So here's how it
came about, which is very interesting. There's been a
lot of controversy in Microsoftland about
side-loading of Windows 8 apps. Microsoft has allowed it, but it's required
quite a bit of money, you basically have to have been a fairly large ISV or
developer with deep pockets and somebody who is willing to navigate some very
complex licensing to do Windows 8 app side-loading by publishing through the
Windows store, but not having everyone in the world see your app. If it's an
app you want to just kind of publish out to your employees, this is what
side-loading is. So, there have been a lot of complaints by developers about
how complex and expensive this is and Microsoft hasn't really said if they have
any kind of resolution to this in the works. So, a group of Microsoft employees
in China, who call themselves Lighthouse and they have a Lighthouse blog, they
created this app that they're calling BootyBay to get
around how onerous Microsoft's restrictions are for side-loading and they
uploaded the alpha version to CopLex. So I wrote
about it yesterday and they've already pulled it down off of CopLex and destroyed their blog post. Sadly. I feel bad because they were trying to solve these issues. But the good side to
this whole BootyBay thing is it brought to light the
controversy. Again. And there are some hints that
Microsoft might talk about side-loading at Build and they may or may not have
something new to say. These guys did jump the gun a little, but they did have a
pretty fun codename and they actually had some code that has different. As soon
as I published it I put World of Warcraft 3 was the inspiration and immediately
people that played it said to me what's World of Warcraft 3-
You don't even know what you're talking about! I'm like you're right, I
don't.

Leo: But you're right,
it was a map in WOW3 Reign of Chaos, so there.

Mary Jo: I guess World of Warcraft
3-

Leo: Here's a shocker.
Just crossed the wire from TechCrunch, Lenovo is buying Motorola from Google.

Paul: Wait, what? Are
you serious?

Leo: I'm just quoting
TechCrunch. "TechCrunch has confirmed reports that state Lenovo is buying
Motorola Mobility from Google. This is the division within Google that the
company purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion, the terms of the deal not revealed
but we're hearing the price was near $3 billion, a loss of $9 billion."

Paul: Yeah I was going
to say that's a lot less than they paid for. Oh, this isn't anywhere, this is
only on TechCrunch.

Leo: Wow, that's kind
of a shocker.

Paul: Where did you see
this?

Leo: TechCrunch.

(Sad Charlie Brown tune)

Leo: I just bought a
Motorola X and now I'm wondering maybe that wasn't the right thing to do.

Paul: Honestly, Lenovo
is a great company. They just may not be terrible.

Leo: They don't make
phones, do they? Or do they in China...

Paul: Yeah, they do.
They were planning to expand to the US this year.

Mary Jo: Right, weren't they
going to make a Windows phone? Wasn't that a rumor at one point.

Leo: Not anymore.

Paul: It was a rumor but
I expect them to stick with-

Leo: They're currently
Android phones, so it would make sense.

Paul: I don't see where
you see this on TechCrunch, that's so weird.

Mary Jo: News of the
potential acquisition comes from writers in China Daily.

Leo: I wonder if that's
true. Boy, these are the Lenovo phones available only in, somewhere. Not here.
They are all Android phones, wow. "For young doers," it says.

Paul: Okay.

Leo: I just have this
report Matt Burns TechCrunch-

Paul: Okay Reuters has
it

Mary Jo: Yeah, and China
Daily has the story too.

Paul: Actually Reuters
was a tweet which they described as a Reuters Exclusive.

Leo: But TechCrunch
says they've now confirmed. Interesting, I don't know what confirmed means.
That is a shocker-

Mary Jo: China Daily says
the deal could be announced Thursday morning in Beijing.

Leo: It's a little
disappointing to me, frankly. But we'll talk more about that, This Week in
Google is coming up next. $3 billion would be a massive loss, although I'm
wondering maybe Google keeps the patents and which is probably the real reason
they bought Lenovo.

Paul: That would be
hilarious. Thus, giving the light and all that bologna. But I bet that's true. This is still not as big as the story about the guy
running into his burning house to get his Xbox. But I understand why you
brought it up.

Leo: Yeah, it doesn't
say all patents. Roiters says Lenovo is in the final
stages with the Google division that includes smart phones, Moto X, and Moto G,
as well as certain patents. I bet that's why it's considerably less money.

Paul: I used to just
think that most of the value of Motorola mobility was those mobile patents.

Leo: Well, apparently
the Moto X isn't selling very well. Which is surprising
because it's my phone of choice and I really like it.

Paul: Yeah, it looks
great.

Leo: I just ordered
another one with bamboo. So that will go over well with our new Chinese
Overlords.

Paul: Instead of putting
the stenciling on the back, do they like burn something in?

Leo: I don't know, I
ordered Chief TWiT on the back of it. We'll see how
they do that. They should burn it in with one of those wood burner kits.

Paul: Exactly, that's
exactly what I mean.

Leo: You know if they
don't I will. Beer pick of the week.

Mary Jo: Yes, the beer pick
of the week. I was trying to find something that went with BootyBay as a beer pick. So I ended up with Ballace.victory@sea,
kind of sounds like a pirate beer, doesn't it?

Leo: It does, it's got
a skull and cross bones on the label.

Mary Jo: Right, this is a
great beer for the weather we've been having here on the east coast. It's a
very big rich vanilla imperial porter 10.0% ABB. But I have had this a few
times and it is just so smooth and delicious. It tastes just like dessert in a
bottle.

Leo: smooth and good.

Mary Jo: Yeah it's so good.
We've had it on tap here in New York, but also it's findable in bottles. I very
thoroughly recommend it if you like big vanilla porters. Paul might like this
one.

Paul: It's got vanilla
in it?!

Leo: It tastes like
vanilla, I don't know that they actually brewed it with vanilla but it's good.

Paul: Have you gotten a
chance to try that Spencer Trap of Steel yet?

Mary Jo: I did, I shared
your opinion of that. Very clovey.

Paul: Okay so, a little
too spicy.

Mary Jo: Paul and I both
got to try the first Abby-

Paul: First American
kind of strain. Actually it's the first non-Europiantrapist ale.

Mary Jo: I think it's going
to be good as it ages a little probably.

Paul: Yeah, it needs to
calm down.

Mary Jo: It does. It was
like very spicy but still pretty cool that we're brewing that in America now.

Paul: Yeah, it's really
expensive.

Mary Jo: Yeah, it's from
Massachusetts right?

Paul: Yeah, I didn't get
the hometown discount for some reason. But yeah it is from somewhere in
Massachusetts.

Mary Jo: I think it's from
Spencer, right?

Paul: Yeah Spencer,
Massachusetts.

Mary Jo: It's called
Spencer.

Paul: Where in
Massachusetts might it be from?

Mary Jo: I'm glad I got to
try it.

Paul: Did you get it on
tap? Is that available on tap?

Mary Jo: Nope, a friend of
mine brought it back from MA and I got to taste.

Paul: I have more of it,
I'll keep trying it. Just purely as a research project.

Leo: I am going to keep
tasting it until I like it, dammit. It's not the first beer of the night, it's
the last. Paul Thurrott is at the super site for
Windows, winsupersite.com. Don't forget his two books free online, or pay a
couple of bucks and support Paul's efforts at windows81book.com and
windowsphonebook.com, really great places to go to read up on either one of
those fine platforms. Mary Jo Foley is at allaboutmicrosoft.com and they both
join us every Wednesday at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC to talk Windows
and Microsoft. I always enjoy this show. I apologize for the Skype issues,
we're working on that and in fact we were going to try to link with Mary Jo and
we're going to see if we can get Microsoft's Links working.

Paul: Something changed
though, right. The last hour was fine.

Leo: We changed over to
our cable connection

Mary Jo: Yeah, I switched
to Cable.

Leo: That was the one
that was giving us fits earlier and now it's fine and the DSL is bad. Internet,
you can't live with it, can't live without it! We will see you all next week on
Windows Weekly!